Quotes of the day

posted at 10:11 pm on September 4, 2014 by Allahpundit

While the world waits for the Leader of the Free World to articulate something remotely resembling a coherent strategy regarding the Islamic State, self-satisfied White House flacks cleverly remind that the administration’s overarching foreign policy is “don’t do stupid s***.” (Kissinger wishes he were as deep.)…

Intelligence experts, including some of the administration’s own national-security team, say foreign threats to the homeland have never been greater.

Nowhere in the world are American interests better off than they were at the outset of this administration. Nowhere are we more respected. Nowhere are we more feared.

Don’t do stupid s*** indeed. This administration’s foreign policy — to the extent one can be discerned — is better described by another blunt phrase: Stuck on stupid.

***

What we have been witnessing the past few weeks, in real time, is the intellectual collapse of Obama’s foreign policy, accompanied by its rapid political unraveling. When Al Franken is ripping you for lacking a strategy against ISIL in Syria, you have a problem.

Obama’s view was that Al Qaeda was holed up in the badlands of Pakistan and you could drone it into submission. Then, if you stopped stirring up hornets’ nests in the Middle East, and demonstrated your good intentions, and pulled entirely out of Iraq and stayed out of Syria, you could focus on “nation building at home” and not worry about places like Mosul and Aleppo…

Our good intentions, as Obama defines them, got us nothing. We elected a president with the middle name of Hussein who did all he could to liquidate George W. Bush’s foreign policy and made outreach to the Muslim world one of his top priorities — yet the terror threat has grown.

We pulled out of Iraq and assiduously stayed out of Syria, and now there is a caliphate stretching across the border that, in the words of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, represents “an imminent threat to every interest we have.”

***

We have, since the fall of Nazi Germany and the rise of its kissing cousin the communists, maintained Western values are superior and right and true. Barack Obama does not believe in the goodness and superiority of Western values. He sees former old colonialists trying to preserve their dubious claims on power. What so many for so long took for granted, Barack Obama sees as oppressive and regressive.

Barack Obama is the first American President who, through his upbringing, writings, and actions, conveys a deep sense of grievance toward the American experiment. The idea that we are the last best hope for mankind is anathema to him. Barack Obama thinks the world, if the American imperial aggressor would just sit on the sidelines, could work out its problems and would be better off.

Barack Obama’s “malaise moment” occurred in the afternoon of Aug. 28, when, dressed for failure in tan, he announced he did not have a strategy for combating the threat posed to us by ISIS and crossed into Carterland, the Desert of Fail feared by all politicians, in which the once fresh new face becomes for all time an object of ridicule, and each attempt made at controlling the damage only makes matters much worse…

“He’s kind of giving up on his job,” said The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard. “He’s planning his post-presidency … having lots of dinner parties where he doesn’t talk about policies or politics but the NBA playoffs. Anything but his job.” On Aug. 20, he interrupted his vacation to extend his regrets to the parents of James Foley, the American journalist whose beheading had been shared with the world by his killers. Minutes later, Obama was filmed in his golf cart, laughing his head off with friends…

No, there is not. At this point the skills that enabled this president to win an election have eroded, grown rusty, or withered away. Most pretty good presidents have their pretty bad moments, but these are subsumed in the overall record and do not sink the whole. Malaise occurs when there is no real record, just a long string of increasingly cringe-inducing moments leading up to one final gesture that ties a big bow on it all. Malaise is where “hope and change” has found its undoing. Bonjour Malaise, and Goodbye, Columbus. He wasn’t that much after all.

***

Presidents must act at least as much as they react; they must seize the initiative and thrust their enemies on the defensive. Sometimes threatening war is the only way to keep the peace. Obama knows this abstractly, but it’s at odds with his interpretation of history and his assessment of the mission of his presidency, which is to end wars, not start them.

To put it in terms of compelling historical metaphor, Obama is a “Guns of August” guy. The book of that title, by Barbara Tuchman, chronicles how bluster and a series of miscalculations led European powers to blunder into World War I exactly a century ago.

The other historical analogy that generations of policymakers carry around in their heads is “Munich.” That is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at the 1938 Munich Conference, which led to World War II. In that analogy, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, which contained enough restive Germans in the Sudetenland region to give Hitler the excuse he needed to carve the country up…

And here’s the important bit — at the same time the White House is the target of relentless complaints that it has not done enough to combat Islamic State, Obama is actually combating Islamic State, launching what appear to be, at this early stage, fairly effective strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq. The rhetoric is not inspiring, but the actions should count for something. “Obama is the only outside player taking real and serious action, however limited, against ISIS in Iraq,” said Hussein Ibish, of the American Task Force on Palestine…

The reason I am sympathetic to his predicament has to do with an 11-year-old memo I keep taped to the wall of my office. It is from Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, to Douglas Feith, then undersecretary of defense for policy. It is dated April 7, 2003 — shortly before Rumsfeld’s mission in Iraq was so awesomely accomplished. The brief memo’s subject line reads, “Issues w/Various Countries.” It opens, “We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.” Rumsfeld continues, “We also need to solve the Pakistan problem. And Korea doesn’t seem to be going well. Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?”

I think it is sufficient to say that policy should not be made by memos written in a Holly Golightly, “Hey, what’s up with Korea, anyway?” style while a war is already underway. I’d rather see a sober, serious and, yes, deliberative, approach to the Islamic State challenge, than to one day read memos like this from inside the Obama administration. Islamic State poses a threat of currently indeterminate seriousness to the U.S. It poses a more urgent threat to moderate Arab states, and also to Europe. The U.S. must build a coalition to combat and neutralize the Islamic State threat — and I believe that Obama knows that this is what must be done — but there is still time to plan, and to think through the consequences of our actions.

***

What’s causing this Jacksonian eruption is the sight of two terrified Americans, on their knees, about to be beheaded by masked fanatics. Few images could more powerfully stoke Jacksonian rage. The politicians denouncing Obama for lacking a “strategy” against ISIS may not have one either, but they have a gut-level revulsion that they can leverage for political gain. “Bomb the hell out of them!” exclaimed Illinois Senator Mark Kirk on Tuesday. “We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age,” added Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These aren’t policy prescriptions. They are cries for revenge…

Obama has always had trouble with Jacksonians, who tend to live outside cities and be older, white, and less educated than Obama’s political base. By killing Osama bin Laden, he temporarily neutralized the political threat they posed, and left Mitt Romney unable to rouse them in 2012. But the memory of that Jacksonian triumph has now faded. And Obama’s cool, measured rhetoric—his talk of “shrink[ing]” ISIS and making it “manageable”—can grate on Jacksonian ears. Jacksonians, Mead argues, do not like half-measures. They never forgave Harry Truman for firing Douglas MacArthur and settling for a stalemate in Korea. They complained bitterly that civilians in Washington weren’t letting American troops win in Vietnam. For Jacksonians, you don’t “degrade” a group that beheads Americans. You annihilate it.

For Obama, there’s an irony to all this. After 9/11, he wisely resisted the Jacksonian fervor of the moment and opposed the war in Iraq. He surely knows that it is precisely at moments like this, when politicians and pundits are demanding vengeance, that presidents are most prone to do “stupid stuff.” He’s staked his foreign-policy legacy on being the president who doesn’t do that. But it is precisely because of this caution and calm that he’s losing political control, even in his own party. And God knows how many beheadings are still to come.

***

Barack Obama deserves the scorn history will shovel on his shoddy, pathetic foreign policy. But it isn’t Obama I’m worried about. It’s the next president. He’ll face a world where American credibility is so deeply shattered that it may be irrevocably broken. And sadly, almost every Republican candidate on the list will fail at reforming the State Department’s culture of appeasement, solicitude to foreign evil, and preemptive abandonment of American interests, principles, and values.

As you start to pay attention to 2016, you should be looking for a singular Republican candidate who can break this Administration’s foreign policy paradigm and articulate a path out of the epic disaster Barack Obama has crafted for us. Obama will leave us a world less safe, less free, and less prosperous than when he became president. The next administration will be left a monumental and near-impossible task, one more difficult and consequential than the Blame Bush crowd inherited in 2009.

Republicans won’t need to fall back on “Blame Obama” rhetoric. The world around them, and history’s judgment on Obama, will do that for them.

***

What is extraordinary in this moment of high, many-fronted peril is that the president’s true views and plans are not only unclear to the world but a mystery to his countrymen.

You want to think he is playing a cool, long game, that there’s a plan and he’s acting on it. He’s holding off stark action to force nations in the region to step up to the plate. The comments of the Saudis and the Emiratis are newly burly. Good, they have military power and wealth, let them move for once. He is teaching our Mideast friends the U.S. is not a volunteer fire department that suits up every time you fall asleep on the couch smoking. In the meantime he is coolly watching new alliances form—wasn’t that the Kurds the other day fighting alongside the Iranians?

Mr. Obama’s supporters frankly hope that there’s a method to the madness, that he is quietly, behind the scenes and with great subtlety pulling together a coalition that will move. But this is more hope than knowledge, and a coalition would need a leader. You have to wonder if potential coalition members won’t think twice about following such an uncertain trumpet. They have reason to doubt Mr. Obama’s leadership, and it is not all due to his current, contradictory statements. Once again, the Syria “red line” episode shows itself an epochal moment. The president’s decision not to act after Syria used poison gas on its citizens showed other leaders of the world that this president will make a vow—a public yet personally tinged one, of great consequence—and feel free, when the moment reaches crisis levels, not to come through. It wasn’t that he looked dishonest, it was that he looked unserious. With the hard human beings who run the world, that is deadly…

Blowback

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Good point. Can’t wait to see how the wranglers and ranch hands receive it when I add it to the music rotation in Saturday night’s regular pachanga down at the Hacienda pool. Somehow doubt that the chicas fiestas con tongas will get off to it, though.

Can’t wait to see how the wranglers and ranch hands receive it when I add it to the music rotation in Saturday night’s regular pachanga down at the Hacienda pool. Somehow doubt that the chicas fiestas con tongas will get off to it, though.

TXUS on September 5, 2014 at 1:22 AM

They might like Mouskouri better than Bartoli.

Mouskouri sings in many languages, and has several very good Spanish ones. Springing something different on them might be fun for you :)

Mouskouri sings in many languages, and has several very good Spanish ones. Springing something different on them might be fun for you :)

Schadenfreude on September 5, 2014 at 1:26 AM

The guys and me are probably looking at more lively musica for the fiestas, alas. You know, the kind that the chicas bonitas like to shake their butts to. No offense, but opera is not given to that, at least not in the ranch milieu, to employ a French word for your elite understanding. ;-)

Whew, got everyone to bed….but…I come back and everyone else went to bed too!

I’m on my way. Thanks for all the advice guys.

And Doc, I know you’re in bed (or at least not online). I’m always getting prompted to seek respite care to take a break from all the care giving, I just can’t seem to do it. Had some pretty bad experiences with nurses and such. One in particular came for wound care on my son. Practically every word out of the biotches mouth was an attempt to push me into letting THEM take care of my son and not me.

Then the whore lied about me in court. She was forced to eat her words several times over though. She should have got some time for perjury, but since Clinton I guess that’s not a big deal anymore.

Anyway. I’ll respite when I’m older I suppose. I always tell myself (and believe it too) that my greatest reward in life is that my son survived his ordeal and he’s around to allow me to care for him. I hope and pray he outlives me by many many moons.

And sadly, almost every Republican candidate on the list will fail at reforming the State Department’s culture of appeasement, solicitude to foreign evil, and preemptive abandonment of American interests, principles, and values.

Read the history of the Barbary Wars, and you’ll see that State has been acting consistently in this manner since the very founding of the US.

In the same way that Reagan had to clean up Carter’s mess (Iran hostage scandal, etc.) and George W. Bush had to clean up Clinton mess (Al-Qeida, etc.), the next Republican president will have to clean up Obama’s mess.

Why does the country keep electing children to the office of president? Just elect an adult, and we won’t have to worry about the messes to clean up.

[Henley is an enigma. My favorite lyricist/poet (Dillon and Harry Chapin were a bit before my time, but I've learned to appreciate them) ... although Bono gives him a run for his money. Being an environmental freak, he's a big leftie. Yet he writes about personal responsibility in songs like "Dirty Laundry" and "Get Over It" while -- instead of looking to government -- he organized an effort to save Walden Woods from development by contributing to and raising millions via private funds.

Muslims are the cane toads of homosapians that devour decency and croak ugly sounds from every direction every day and every night. They are a blight even when not invited. When invited, they are a plague. I would prefer actual cane toads to Muslims.

“We don’t have a strategy”, sounds like an honest enough admission.
But, what he really said was, I don’t like, or, agree with the choices that the intelligence and military presented to me. Which is inline with what president nO has done with the congress since he squandered his supermajority; A veto is a no.
Perhaps he should channel the wizened words from an elder stateswoman, “At this point, what difference does it make?”
To which we should all be relieved that he cannot effect more “change” that he already has.

so the morning joe crew doesn’t like the kansas statutes apparently that deemed the dem must stay on the ballot….they were mocking the secretary of state of actually following the statutes as if he made the decision because he is a republican not because it is the law

I’m sure he’s going to talk about the “coalition” he’s building to fight ISO to the gates of Hell (or maybe just manage them with a stern talking to or something).

The WH sees those poll numbers too so look for the rat-eared wonder to be all “presidenty” on foreign policy- especially if the jobs numbers are as bleak as is expected. The countdown clock for the mid-terms is upon us and it is going to take more than sending out the DoJ to form a lynch mob in Ferguson to get the Obama voting bloc to the polls. Gays, blacks, illegals, and feminists don’t give a damn about foreign affairs but their self-interests and selfishness might respond to economic issues.

Obama has always had trouble with Jacksonians, who tend to live outside cities and be older, white, and less educated than Obama’s political base. By killing Osama bin Laden, he temporarily neutralized the political threat they posed, and left Mitt Romney unable to rouse them in 2012. But the memory of that Jacksonian triumph has now faded. And Obama’s cool, measured rhetoric—his talk of “shrink[ing]” ISIS and making it “manageable”—can grate on Jacksonian ears. Jacksonians, Mead argues, do not like half-measures. They never forgave Harry Truman for firing Douglas MacArthur and settling for a stalemate in Korea. They complained bitterly that civilians in Washington weren’t letting American troops win in Vietnam. For Jacksonians, you don’t “degrade” a group that beheads Americans. You annihilate it.

Total capitulation at the negotiating table is also acceptable.

What they never say is that to an HONORABLE foe, who fights HONESTLY and by the LAWS OF WAR, we are also gracious victors and are willing to help the civilian survivors bury the dead. Maybe even fix the place up enough so that those who lost can figure out how to make a government that will NOT PO the US in the future… that SAVES LIVES. Even getting an horrific, dishonest foe to admit that they screwed up and were acting horrifically and dishonestly is a big step forward as part of capitulation, but that means that the parts of the culture that created that have to go as part of the peace process.

Peace is ALSO a process and you don’t just sign a document and leave, but take stock of what it took to GOT YOU to that document. A peace process or lasting treaty does NOT exist when the enemy is defeated and you run away from the HARD WORK OF MAKING PEACE since peace is NOT the default value for mankind but Nature is and Nature isn’t all that pretty.

War is an on/off affair: either don’t fight or fight to the bitter end, there is nothing else against a declared foe or one you declare war on. Do or do not, anything else leads to far more dead and the disillusionment that you actually know WHAT you are doing because you can’t even get the concept of WAR right. If you can’t figure out war then you have no chance of knowing how to build PEACE. War is part of the process and if you say you are going to fight it, have to fight it then you fight it to the end and you can clean up on mistakes made at that point, not one second before.

You cannot contain chaos, you cannot contain nature and you cannot contain those who do not act with any form of rational thought that is not magical in its basis. ISIS has that. So does Iran. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. HAMAS. FARC. Tamil Tigers, what’s left of them. Moro Islamic Liberation Front, what’s left of them. Shining Path, what is left of them. Notice that ‘what’s left of them’ bit? They are not gone until the very last adherent is dead. That is how you contain those spreading Private War to their own ends: you put them to an end to save the order of Nations and civilization as a whole. They do not bargain honestly, they follow nor rules of war save their own which is based on magical thought, and they do not even fight with a uniform on to protect a people but, instead, to place their order down on the Earth to vanquish all of mankind. We used to know how to deal with such people. Now we are too civilized to survive them.

I can hear wolfie and tingles already….he sounded like a leader…a great commander in chief

cmsinaz on September 5, 2014 at 7:19 AM

My burning question this morning is why the FBI has time to launch a lynch mob in Ferguson and persecute a governor who did not violate any state law… but where is the FBI when it comes to Benghazi, the IRS scandal, or voter fraud?

bloody infuriating the priorities this department holds or I should say this administration holds

cmsinaz on September 5, 2014 at 7:49 AM

The AG is supposed to be the Attorney for the United States. Holder (like RFK) has become Obama’s lawyer against the people of the United States. JFK died before RFK’s tenure went this far no such luck with ending Holder’s tenure early.

I guess El Presidente’ Choomer needs to issue another stern warning to those uppity russkies or sumthin’…

“While NATO is contemplating its existential purpose in a world where the Cold War has suddenly come back with a vengeance, and the military alliance has found itself woefully unprepared to deal with a Russia which no longer accepts the supremacy of the west (appropriately enough NATO is doing this on a golf course) Russia is also strategizing, only instead of issuing “sharply-worded catchphrases” and hashtags, a Russian general has called for Russia to revamp its military doctrine, last updated in 2010, to clearly identify the U.S. and its NATO allies as Moscow’s enemy number one. That in itself is not disturbing: we reported as much yesterday and is merely more rhetorical posturing. Where things, however, get very problematic is that the general demands that Russia spell out the conditions under which the country would launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the 28-member military alliance….”

Ralph Peters was on fire last night. He said that there has been no contributions to bettering humanity, only oil and terrorism had been exported from the ME for at least the last 100 years. Then expand that to every other muslim country.